American War Presidents (ePub)

Pre-University Paper from the year 2010 in the subject Didactics - English - Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, , language: English, abstract: In the last 250 years the USA has been involved in more than twenty wars. The reasons for the American interventions in those wars were quite different.

The involvement in the Barbary Wars which lasted from 1801 until 1805 was caused by the fact that the pasha of Tripoli wanted to blackmail the United States. The USA had to decide whether they wanted to be protected from pirate attacks or not. President Thomas Jefferson saw only one opportunity and this was fighting against Tripoli.1 The Mexican-American War, which took place from 1846 until 1848, was another war fought by the Americans. During that time the extension of the American territory was the main aim of the American President James K. Polk. The war grew out of an argument between the Mexicans and the Americans, because the USA shifted the border between those two states in the Mexican's disfavor. After the outburst of the war it took two years until the Mexicans had to give up, facing a great loss of territory.

Another example is the Vietnam War which lasted from 1961 until 1975. The United States believed that their duty was to stop the advance of communism. The plan of President John F. Kennedy was to help the population of South Vietnam to get rid of the Vietcong guerrilla.After North Vietnam has attacked American warships, President Lyndon B. Johnson managed to get the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution accepted by the Congress. Soon after this, the USA declared the civil war in South Vietnam as a war of the United States against the communistic North Vietnam.

All in all it is obvious that the reasons for the American involvements in those wars are very different and strongly linked to the incidents in those times and the decisions of the American Presidents.

In the following I am going to take a closer look at two different wars in which the United States of America were involved in. I am going to direct my attention to the American President's role in this time and his impact on certain decisions and on the war itself.